Headline: The assault on Aleppo is a moral test for the west

Sub-headline: Will anyone stop Russia turning the city into another Grozny, asks David Gardner

A perfectly executed piece of propaganda, with the central character being Putin The Terrible. And judging from Mr. Gardner’s very impressive CV, his credibility to be a ‘Moral Judge’ about ‘Western Responsibility’ for the carnage in the ‘Middle East’ i.e. Syria, should be un-challegable?

The history of Western Imperialism that predates from well before Sykes-Picot, the Americans being the latest fellow travelers of that mendacious and self-serving exercise in Western Paternalism, leaves no doubt as to the motives of the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) zealots, and their political propinquity with the Neo-Conservatives, and their abject worship of Mars. To put it in Pascalian terms Mr. Gardner places his wager on this misbegotten alliance.

But the rhetorical frame must, of necessity, be framed in moral terms for the ‘Western Reader’: suffering from a debilitating fatigue, the root of which is that The War on Terror is now thirteen years old, and its adjunct the Drone War have fostered the growth of ISIS, and the Caliphate, as credible answer to an utterly pernicious and destructive Western interventionism. What Mr. Gardner and his allies miss and or elide from their narrative is that ISIS and its precursors are anti-imperial in nature.

Samuel P. Huntington’s prescient rhetorical intervention of 1993, framed it as a ‘Clash of Civilizations’, he was subject to his own WASP paranoia of the Other, which dovetailed with his status as operative and defender of the American National Security State. Not seeing that Islam is an integral part of the Abrahamic Tradition: meaning that the ‘they’ that he points to is really a part of the ‘us’ and not in least ‘alien’. Huntington’s ‘Clash’ was the Cold War projected onto the world i.e. everyone was not just a potential enemy.